LONDON-Scientists developing techniques to count great whales from space say the largest ever recorded mass stranding event was probably underestimated.
The carcasses of 343 sei whales were spotted on remote beaches in Patagonia, Chile, in 2015 - but this survey work was conducted from planes and boats, and carried out many weeks after the deaths actually occurred.
However, an analysis of high-resolution satellite images of the area taken much closer in time to the stranding has now identified many more bodies. It’s difficult to give a precise total for the number of whales involved but in one sample picture examined by researchers, the count was nearly double.
The new investigation, published in the Plos One journal, was undertaken as a proof of principle exercise by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and various Chilean organisations.
The WorldView-2 satellite will see features at the surface larger than half a metre across
It’s not easy to see an object, even one as large as a great whale, from several hundred kilometres up in space, but the international team believes the capability of modern satellites now makes this a practical task.
Being able to detect strandings more effectively will inform the ongoing conservation of whales. It will also flag potentially deteriorating ocean conditions, something the fishing industry for example will be keen to know about.
The monitoring of whales from orbit is set therefore to become a powerful tool with which to assess the state of the environment.
“The technology is getting better all the time,” said Dr Carlos Olavarría from the Centre for Advanced Studies in Arid Zones (CEAZA), La Serena, Chile.
“In this study, we were using 50cm resolution images, but the satellites now can see 30cm. In the future, we’d like also to be able to analyse the pictures automatically, rather than manually; and I’m sure as more minds are applied to the problem, this will become possible,” he told BBC News.
What happened in the stranding event?
It’s not clear why such a large number of sei whales beached en masse in early 2015. One reason for the uncertainty is that researchers were very late in getting to the scene to run tests to establish the cause.
That was in part because the stranding occurred in a very thinly populated, and difficult to access, area of central Patagonia called the Gulf of Penas. It has multiple fjords, channels and islands, and the deaths only came to light by accident when an unrelated expedition chanced on the carcasses.
This was a good month after the event and by then the sei whales had already started to decompose. Nonetheless, a ground team’s inquiries led it to the conclusion that the cetaceans had probably been poisoned after consuming toxic algae.